scholarly journals The mystique of the self in German preromanticism

KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Péter Tánczos

The paper surveys the extent of the connection between German idealism and Preromanticism on the one hand, and Medieval mysticism on the other.  For the Romantic model of identity and subjectivity in Novalis and Schlegel, Fichte’s idealist position remains a starting point, as changes of terminology and approach have changed the way the Self was articulated very considerably. This shift in meaning is the beginning of Romanticism, but despite its significance, the change has its precursors. The desire towards the absolute, the shifting value of religious experience, positing identity without objectification are all positions that can already be found in Medieval thinkers like Eckhardt and Böhme. In some cases, one can even locate a direct connection. The paper focuses on how the connection between Medieval philosophers’ paradox ideas on non-being and emptiness relate to theories of the self in preromantic authors.

Derrida Today ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-270
Author(s):  
Francesco Vitale

The paper aims to present a reading of the question of Testimony rising in Derrida's later works (from Faith and Knowledge to Poetics and Politics of Witnessing): the experience of Testimony as the irreducible condition of the relation to the Other, of every possible link among living human singularities and, thus, of the thinking of a community to come. This thinking is able to divert the community from the economy grounding and structuring it within our political tradition governed by the metaphysics of presence, which demands the sacrifice of the Other in its multiple theoretical and practical forms. We intend to read this proposal and to point out its rich perspectives by bringing it into the articulation of an ethical-political archi-writing. So we suggest going back to Derrida's early analyses of phenomenology and to De la grammatologie in order to present a reading of archi-writing as the irreducible condition of the relation to otherness and, thus, of the experience through which a living human singularity constitutes itself, a singularity different from the one our tradition compels us to think of within the pattern of the absolute presence to the self, free from the relation to the other.


Author(s):  
Feng Zhu

This paper aims to critically introduce the applicability of Foucault’s late work, on the practices of the self, to the scholarship of contemporary computer games. I argue that the gameplay tasks that we set ourselves, and the patterns of action that they produce, can be understood as a form of ‘work on the self’, and that this work is ambivalent between, on the one hand, an aesthetic transformation of the self – as articulated by Foucault in relation to the care or practices of the self – in which we break from the dominant subjectivities imposed upon us, and on the other, a closer tethering of ourselves through our own playful impulses, to a neoliberal subjectivity centred around instrumentally-driven selfimprovement. Game studies’ concern with the effects that computer games have on us stands to gain from an examination of Foucault’s late work for the purposes of analysing and disambiguating between the nature of the transformations at stake. Further, Foucault’s tripartite analysis of ‘power-knowledge-subject’, which might be applied here as ‘game-discourse-player’, foregrounds the imbrication of our gameplay practices – the extent to which they are due to us and the way in which our own volitions make us subject to power, which is particularly pertinent in the domain of play.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-145
Author(s):  
André Luiz Cruz Sousa

The aim of this paper is to study a set of three issues related to the understanding of partial justice and partial injustice as character dispositions, namely the distinctive circumstance of action, the emotion involved therein and the pleasure or pain following it. Those points are treated in a relatively obscure way by Aristotle, especially in comparison with their treatment in the expositions of other character virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics. Building on the expression ‘capacity towards the other’ (δύναμις ἐν τῷ πρὸς ἕτερον), the paper highlights the interpersonal nature of the circumstances of just and unjust actions, and points how such nature is directly related to notions such as ‘profit’ (κέρδος) or ‘getting more’(πλεονεκτεῖν) as well as to the unusual conception of excess, defect and intermediacy in Nicomachean Ethics Book V. The interpersonal nature of just and unjust actions works also as the starting-point for the interpretation both of the pleasure briefly mentioned in 1130b4 as characterizing the greedy person and of the emotion involved in acting justly or greedy, which is mentioned in an extremely elliptical way in 1130b1-2: the paper argues, on the one hand, that the pleasure felt in acting justly or unjustly concerns not only the goods that are the object of just or unjust interactions, but also the way such interactions affect the people involved; on the other hand, it argues that the emotion actuated in just or unjust interactions relates to the agent’s concern or lack of concern with the good of those people.


1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (02) ◽  
pp. 30-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dieter Wandschneider

When the Ideal is understood as ontologically fundamental within the framework of an idealistic system, and the Real, on the other hand, as derived, then the first and foremost task of a philosophy of this kind is to prove the claimed fundamentally of the Ideal. This is immediately followed by the further demand to also substantiate on this basis the existence of the Real and particularly of natural being. These tasks have been understood and attempts made to solve them in very different ways in German Idealism - about which I cannot go into more detail here. Let me say this much: that Fichte and Schelling, it appears to me, already fail at the first task, ie. neither Fichte nor Schelling really succeeds in substantiating their pretended ideal as an absolute principle of philosophy. Fichte believes he has such a principle in the direct evidence of the self. However, as this is of little use for the foundation of a generally binding philosophy because of its ultimately private character, Fichte already replaces it with the principle of the absolute self already in his first Wissenschaftlehre of 1794. As a construction detached from the concrete self, this of course lacks that original direct certainty from which Fichte started in the first place, in other words: because the construction of an absolute self can no longer refer to direct evidence, it must be substantiated separately, something which Fichte, I believe, nonetheless fails to do. The same criticism can, in my view, be made of Schelling, who ingeniously substitutes constructions for arguments. His early intuition of an absolute identity which simultaneously underlies spirit and nature, remains just as thetic and unproven as that eternal subject on which he based the representation of his system in, for example, the Munich lectures of 1827.


Author(s):  
Jean-Marc Narbonne

Abstract Taking as a starting point a crucial passage of Aristotle’s Poetics where poetical technique is declared to be different from all other disciplines in human knowledge (25, 1460b8–15), I try to determine in what sense and up to what point poetry can be seen as an autonomous or sui generis creative activity. On this path, I come across the so-called “likely and necessary” rule mentioned many times in Aristotle’s essay, which might be seen as a limitation of the poet’s literary freedom. I then endeavour to show that this rule of consistency does not preclude the many means by which the poet can astonish his or her audience, bring them into error, introduce exaggerations and embellishments on the one hand (and viciousness and repulsiveness on the other), have the characters change their conduct along the way, etc. For Aristotle, the poetic art—and artistic activities in general—is concerned not with what in fact is or what should be (especially ethically), but simply with what might be. Accordingly, one can see him as historically the very first theorist fiction, not only because he states that poetry relates freely to the possible, but also because he explains why poetry is justified in doing so.


Philosophy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
James Laing

Abstract In this paper, I argue that we face a challenge in understanding the relationship between the ‘value-oriented’ and ‘other-oriented’ dimensions of shame. On the one hand, an emphasis on shame's value-oriented dimension leads naturally to ‘The Self-Evaluation View’, an account which faces a challenge in explaining shame's other-oriented dimension. This is liable to push us towards ‘The Social Evaluation View’. However The Social Evaluation View faces the opposite challenge of convincingly accommodating shame's ‘value-oriented’ dimension. After rejecting one attempt to chart a middle course between these extremes, I argue that progress can be made if we reject the widespread assumption that the other-oriented dimension of shame is best understood primarily terms of our concern with the way we appear to others. Instead, I outline an account which treats shame as manifesting our desire primarily for interpersonal connection and which elucidates the property of shamefulness in terms of merited avoidance (or rejection).


1988 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
pp. 389-411
Author(s):  
James Duban

The date was 19 July 1859; the occasion, the commencement address at the Harvard Divinity School. Twenty-one years earlier, as Henry Whitney Bellows well knew, Ralph Waldo Emerson had there delivered the famous Divinity School Address, which offended the Unitarian faculty by berating historical Christianity, by advancing that the moral and religious sentiments were synonymous, and by claiming that intuitive apprehension of these sentiments could elevate persons to Christ-like stature. The ensuing “miracles controversy”—including, on the one hand, Andrews Norton's charges about “The Latest Form of Infidelity” and, on the other, George Ripley's, Theodore Parker's, and (early on, at least) Orestes Brownson's efforts to establish a “religion of the heart” by championing Kant over Locke—has been chronicled elsewhere. More to the present point is the way that, at a time when heated controversy over Emerson and his intuitionalist disciples might have seemed dated, Bellows attacked the self-reliant tendencies of Emerson's 1838 address: “The Emersonian and transcendental school at home, acknowledge[s] only one true movement in humanity—the egoistic—the self-asserting and self-justifying movement—which is Protestantism broken loose from general history.” Such criticism was hardly unprecedented in the school of divinity from which Bellows himself had graduated just a year before Emerson would deliver the Divinity School Address; nor would the faculty at Harvard have deemed Bellows innovative in chastising “the transcendental philosophy” for “making the … human and the divine, the natural and the supernatural, one and the same.


2021 ◽  
pp. 35-53
Author(s):  
Kirill Chepurin

This essay re-reads German Idealism as a thinking oscillating between world-justification or theodicy, on the one hand, and the utopic or the non-place at which the world is delegitimized and even annihilated, on the other. For Hegel, world-history is theodicy: to think the way the world has been historically constructed or produced by spirit is to justify this world as necessarily the way it is. This essay calls it “the transcendental knot”: to think the possibility of the world is to justify it as necessary—a problem with which post-Kantian thinkers but also contemporary political theology and continental philosophy grapple. Through an analysis of the ultimate telos of the world and the subject’s striving in the world in Schelling, the late Fichte, and Friedrich Schlegel—as well as via such a-worldly concepts as the absolute, bliss, nothingness, God, chaos, and irony—this essay reconfigures German Idealism and Romanticism as spanning the conceptual space between two poles, world-annihilation and world-construction, and traces the ways in which these thinkers attempt to resolve the transcendental knot, or to think the way the world is without absolutizing it.


Author(s):  
Stefan Krause ◽  
Markus Appel

Abstract. Two experiments examined the influence of stories on recipients’ self-perceptions. Extending prior theory and research, our focus was on assimilation effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in line with a protagonist’s traits) as well as on contrast effects (i.e., changes in self-perception in contrast to a protagonist’s traits). In Experiment 1 ( N = 113), implicit and explicit conscientiousness were assessed after participants read a story about either a diligent or a negligent student. Moderation analyses showed that highly transported participants and participants with lower counterarguing scores assimilate the depicted traits of a story protagonist, as indicated by explicit, self-reported conscientiousness ratings. Participants, who were more critical toward a story (i.e., higher counterarguing) and with a lower degree of transportation, showed contrast effects. In Experiment 2 ( N = 103), we manipulated transportation and counterarguing, but we could not identify an effect on participants’ self-ascribed level of conscientiousness. A mini meta-analysis across both experiments revealed significant positive overall associations between transportation and counterarguing on the one hand and story-consistent self-reported conscientiousness on the other hand.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Assist. Prof. Dr. Kazım Yıldırım

The cultural environment of Ibn al-Arabi is in Andalusia, Spain today. There, on the one hand, Sufism, on the other hand, thinks like Ibn Bacce (Death.1138), Ibn Tufeyl (Death186), Ibn Rushd (Death.1198) and the knowledge and philosophy inherited by scholars, . Ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240), that was the effect of all this; But more mystic (mystic) circles came out of the way. This work, written by Ibn al-Arabi's works (especially Futuhati Mekkiye), also contains a very small number of other relevant sources.


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